From the cradle to the grave. It is the place we all start and the place we all end up. But what happens to the in between? What happens when the world of the paranormal tries to break those rules?
First off, we take a look at the story of a haunting. However, this is no ordinary ghost because this spirit may be haunting an unborn child. And then we take a look at the story of a little girl playing with her imaginary friend. But her family soon realizes that this isn't some random figment of imagination.
It's actually a ghost of a long dead relative. Which should be reassuring. It should tell us all that there truly is life after death. But if this little girl is telling the truth, it will actually send a shiver down your spine.
Today on Dead Rabbit Radio. Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dead Rabbit Radio. I'm your host, Jason Partner.
I'm having Greg, Dale, you guys are having a great day too. Hope you set up some awesome plans for the weekend. A quick reminder, I'm gonna be going on vacation. So this is the last new episode that's gonna be put out until August 27th.
So it's about what, one, two, three, three weeks and a day or two. We'll have new episodes for you at that time. I'm actually gonna be leaving the state. It's gonna be a long vacation.
I'm gonna go see some family and I haven't packed. I'm not prepared for it at all. I'm recording this episode on Saturday. I fly out on Sunday.
I'm trying to get my stuff edited and packed and I wanna do my dishes and I've just really been taking it a little too easy. The best stuff kind of couple weeks. Should have been preparing for this. Now it gets coming out of the blue.
But someone who always comes out of the blue like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day. Everyone get on your feet and give it for one of our legacy Patreon supporters, Marcus Claussen. Woohoo. Yeah, we ha.
Yeah. He's all jumping on in. Jumping on into dead Radio command, shocking us all. Marcus, you're gonna be our captain.
Our pilot stuff. So if you guys can't support the show through the Patreon or if you guys can't support the show through the merch store. I totally understand. I really, really do.
I don't just say that. I honestly get it because there's a lot of creators that I don't get to financially support. But what you can do for the show is to help spread the word about de Rap Radio. Tell Your friends, tell your family, tell everyone.
You know Dead Rap radio is your favorite paranormal show. That's not the way that you can help the show grow. Marcus, I'm gonna toss you the keys. Let's go classic this episode.
I'm gonna toss you keys to Jason's lobby. Everyone climb on board as Marcus drives us out of the red radio command all the way out to a young mother's house. We're going to take a path down the paranormal route to take a look at. Two ghost stories I think complement each other pretty well.
I think this is interesting stuff. Marcus is driving us out to the house of his young mother. We're going to call her Scarlet. And she's I guess the term would be an expectant mother because she's seven months pregnant.
She's walking around her house with a little baby inside of her. She's probably sitting there eating some ice cream and the baby's like moving around. And she says that in this house she believes it is haunted. She believes that how she's staying is haunted.
But while she's never had a first hand experience with any ghosts in this house, odd things have happened. It's probably those simple things that we don't know whether or not it's paranormal. Like I swear I put my keys down right here. Now they're in the other room.
Television turning on the middle of night. Very, very subtle things that you could always kind of go, well, you know, it's just an electrical problem. Oh well, you know, it's just I'm allergic to knowing where I put my keys. But In April of 2024, very recent story, she's home alone, her husband's gone.
Her husband may have been experiencing more paranormal stuff as well. But she goes, I hadn't really experienced anything. She also says, if there is a ghost in this house, we believe it's a nice ghost. Because Scarlet or her husband never felt uncomfortable being there.
It's not been a menacing spirit. April 2024, Scarlett is home alone. She's cleaning out the pantry because they're gonna be doing this renovation in the kitchen. And that's when she reached down and she opens up a drawer to grab out a bag when she is suddenly overcome with this very weird feeling.
Instinctively she turns to the right and she sees something. I like the way she described it. I'm gonna say it in quotes. What she saw was quote, not a light or a figure by any means, but just something moved by me.
Just something she said at the exact same time. You know, she's in the kitchen, she says at the exact same time, on their fridge, there were ultrasound photos of the baby boy. Inside of her, there are these ultrasound photos attached probably magnets to the fridge. And when she felt this feeling, and she looked at her, and she looked at her right, and she saw this thing, the photos on the fridge moved as if a strong wind had come by.
And I think we're all familiar with that type of motion. Like you're walking by something so fast, or a breeze comes into a building so fast that the papers, even if there's a magnet attaching them to the fridge, even if there's something fixing the paper, it fixing part of them to the fridge, the part that is not held down, kind of flapping the breeze, saw something walk by, felt this weird feeling, saw the photos move. And Scarlet feels her heart drop and her belly begin to cramp. She stands there.
I mean, all this stuff is happening so rapidly. Any two of these things would be alarming. But now they're all happening. Once she took a second, then she began to pray to God.
She asked God to put his loving hands over her to protect the baby, to protect her home, and to protect herself. And after this, after this prayer, Scarlet begins to feel better. And it's interesting. She goes, still, she didn't feel uncomfortable.
It's not like a dark presence lurking in the house like you would imagine a ghost to be, especially someone who's never had a ghostly experience. Right. You always imagine the worst because that's what you see in horror movies. She goes, I didn't feel uncomfortable, but I felt very off.
And I also felt that everything was connected. It wasn't that I was just feeling weird and my heart dropped. No, it was all part of the same phenomenon. Everything was connected.
The photo moving was connected to the belly cramp was connected to me seeing something out of the corner of my eye. All of this stuff is connected in some way. What's interesting isn't Scarlett does what I've personally done and I think a lot of people would do, is she tries to replicate the phenomenon. Not the hard part.
She's not trying to give herself belly branches. Doing branches. No, the part that you could easily replicate. She began to walk back and forth in front of the fridge fairly quickly to see if she could in some way generate enough air to make the photo move the way that it did.
And I've done that. I've experienced paranormal phenomenon. And the first thing that you do want to do is try to weed out the chance that this was you or this was an air conditioner kicking on. Or this was something completely understandable.
So you will, like, wave your hand in front of the fridge, seeing if you can, because you think, well, maybe it's because I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye and I turned so fast the air from my body made the photograph on the fridge Move. I've 100% done that. She said she couldn't replicate it. She kept trying to repeat the motion that she was doing.
She was trying to make the paper move. She couldn't replicate it. She actually said, well, maybe the air conditioner turned on. Maybe there's a blast of air.
So she went. She verified the air conditioner was shut off. And she. This is.
This is kind of the crux of the matter for me. Her fear, this is totally legit. Her fear was that this had something to do with the baby because the photo moved. And it's interesting.
I don't know if only the photo moved or if only because there's multiple ultrasound photos and those are the ones that moved. I don't know if she also had, like, bills up there, like other stuff, a to do list, and those didn't move, and only the ultrasound photos moved. That would 100 be even more alarming. But she said, I started to wonder if this had something to do with my child because it seemed to be centered around that the photos moved.
Other things may move as well, but definitely the photos moved. She's having these physical sensations like the belly cramping. She goes, but her baby was still kicking after the fact, so, you know, the baby was still alive. You're all super scared.
I hope we find out that it turns out to be a healthy baby boy. What's interesting is she posted this back in April. She kind of posted it right after it happened or shortly after it happened. Underneath the throwaway, a name called Throwaway 783-4528.
And she posted it in the ghost subreddit underneath the headline. I had a weird experience tonight, and I'm worried a ghost is targeting my baby, which is a fair worry, which is a super fair worry. Now, this would have been the first real, what she would consider paranormal incident for her to feel in this house. Like she said, I never really had any experience with it before that.
Then this one happens. You're gonna be concerned. You're gonna be concerned about what it could be. And because it did seem kind of baby centric.
What does that mean? I did look through her posting history like I will do when I find these and it does appear that the baby was born just fine. She hasn't posted in a couple months. She hasn't posted in two months.
So that would have been in May. The baby was. Jason doesn't. Again, it's always basic math.
It's not like you're trying to find the square root of something. If the baby was seven months in April, in May, the baby would have been eight months, but the baby would be born by now. And there are no updates that the baby is not doing okay. Which horrific.
Horrific to think about. There's no update. I'm going to assume that the baby has been born totally fine because we don't have an update. And I always like to assume the best.
But you imagine how vulnerable you must be as an expectant mother and to experience not just a haunting, but your first haunting, and not just your first haunting, but one that seems less targeted at you and more at your unborn child. And I start to think about it. If we look at ghost lore, if we look at what we believe to be real with ghosts, we do have some interesting things going on here. One, like I said, I don't think she.
She definitely says I haven't had many or any paranormal experiences. Nothing firsthand. What is she doing? In the beginning of the story that you and I as ghost enthusiasts probably picked up on right away, Renovations.
That is often a cause of heightened ghost activity when you're renovating a location that is already haunted. It's not 100, it's not 100. But this is what we see over, you know, decades of research with this. Centuries, really, at this point, renovating a place that may be haunted can actually increase the ghostly activity.
And kind of the general agreed upon reason why is because if a ghost is haunting a location and they've been there for 20, 30 years, maybe longer, they're used to it. And all of a sudden you're tearing apart their kitchen. The kitchen that they use when they live there, the kitchen that they may have installed when they first built a house or whatever. And now you're tearing it apart.
Sure, you're gonna probably have a better kitchen in the long run, but it's a different kitchen. It's not a kitchen that ghost is familiar with. I talk about it. We have a Walmart here in town that I have friends who work at Walmart.
And I told the story before the podcast, so I'll keep it short of it. They used to have a massive fabrics and crafts departments with yarn and string, other stuff, fabric. It was almost one. I Don't say one quarter of the store, but pretty close to that, like 1/5.
1/6 of the Walmart here in town was dedicated to fabrics and crafts and corporate Walmart, even like that for 20 years. Corporate Walmart said, why do you have so many fabrics and grabs? No Walmart, there's more small Walmart, a giant Walmart may have a section that's the same in square footage, but because our store was much smaller, had a smaller footprint, but we had this massive amount of square footage, it did seem to take up almost a quarter of the store. It's very popular though.
There was no place else in town you could really get this stuff that, you know, driving 30 minutes to the Dallas or something like that. Corporate said you got to change that. It's a bad use of floor space. It's not as profitable as other stuff here.
You're gonna have to change that. So you know, the manager, she worked there for 20 years, a really nice person. She was upset about it. She thought about retiring and she stayed on for maybe a couple years later, but then she ended up leaving.
The customers were upset because now they had to start buying their stuff either online, which a lot of people like supporting. I know Walmart's, I know Walmart's not a local business, but this Walmart and it really feels like it because the employees have been working there for so long. Most of the employees, especially department heads had been there for 15, 20 years. They ended up renovating it.
So now fabrics and crafts got cut down to about one third of the size. And there's still, you know, a good amount of like scrapbook stuff there, fabrics and all this stuff. But what they put in its place for the other remaining section was automotive and hardware and paint. And that is when that portion of the store began to become haunted.
Employees have told me that you'll be. No one likes working in that department overnight, you know, like the stalkers. It wasn't a 24 hour Walmart. So 11 o' clock they closed down and you'd have the people who are unloading the trucks and putting everything up on the shelves and all that.
No one wanted to work over there in automotive, the hardware, the paint department, because they all said it was haunted. It was really creepy to be over there. People said that stuff would be falling off the shelves. You'd walk by and everything would be there.
And then you'd hear a. And you'd turn around and there would be a couple of items that had just fallen off the shelf behind you. Displays, cardboard, you Know, like there's cardboard stand up displays that would be just fine all day long, customers walking back and forth in front of them, kids poking them, shopping carts bumping into them. Totally fine.
Two in the morning, you're over there putting away wrenches and the cardboard stand up will get knocked over. I asked and I honestly don't remember the answer to this at this point. I asked at the time I was hearing this, I go, did you guys ever watch video footage? And I don't remember the answer.
I don't honestly remember the answer now at this point there would be. The awesome part is that if they have video footage, they could be like, wow, that really did fall. Well, actually the thing about it, there's no debate over whether or not the stuff is actually falling. The debate was whether it was getting knocked over.
It would be interesting to see the footage so you could prove that you're walking down an island after you pass something 10 seconds later and 5ft away from you, somebody goes off shelf. The other thing is that Walmart, like most retail stores, don't like their employees to know where the cameras are. You'll notice where some of them are. They make them obvious, but all the cameras anyway, because, you know, employees steal more stuff than customers.
Anyways. My theory with that, because the place was never haunted before that people weren't talking about, man, hey, putting stuff away in fabrics. And perhaps they make me go put this yarn away. I'm like, no way.
But once it became automotive and hardware and paint, this is when haunting started. My theory was, was that there was a ghost in that department all the time in fabrics and crafts. I go maybe with an old lady. And her happiest memories was every Tuesday she'd go to Walmart and spend the day picking out her stuff and talking to Lou, that was a manager.
She's really, really cool. She's retired, this one. But talking to Lou and meeting people from the community, you have the same hobbies as me. It was where she was happiest when she died.
She was now haunting this beautiful fabrics and crafts area at the Hood River Walmart. But now she's trapped in the automotive department. Now if she's actually in this square footage that has been removed and now she's in the automotive department. She's looking at wrenches and screwdrivers and car batteries and buckets of paint.
She hates it and she's making her displeasure known. That's my theory as to why there was no ghost previous to that, but there were ghosts after that. Now Walmart did have a couple people dying in it as well. Which I imagine is typical for Walmarts around the world.
They're just so heavily trafficked department stores popular as Walmart, you're have people having heart attacks, slipping and falling. Crack. And they all sorts of weird stuff happen. They're not weird, just life happened to local Walmart.
It's not like it happened every day. It wasn't like a death. You're possibly a death trip if you win. But so doing the renovations and we do see that in a lot of typical ghost stories.
They started renovating an old library and then the place became haunted and we started renovating this old house we bought out the middle of nowhere. And we started noticing our tools disappearing. It's kind of the ghost making their displeasure known. So that might have been the place may have been haunted and the ghost just didn't really care.
Even examples I gave about losing the keys and turning the TV on, those were what I thought it could be. I don't know if it was anything even like that because that seems kind of mischievous. But here you have this ghost who probably is more active because they're renovating the kitchen. So we have that as classic ghost lore.
Classic ghosting. What's interesting to me though is I wonder because we'll never really answer this. We know that children, again, according to ghost lore, none of this stuff. This is all speculative.
We just have to look at past events. But we see stories like the next story we're gonna cover is that children seem to be able to see the paranormal better than adults. And my theory has always been it's because kids don't know the limits of reality or what we think are the limits of reality. When you're a child, you know that you can't walk through a wall.
Maybe you tried it, right? You know certain things. You know that loud noises make your ears hurt. You know that bright light is temporarily blinding.
I was, I was raised in Guantanamo Bay where they played nothing but Deaf Leopard and Maxwell Maldi Long while shining a flashlight in my eyes. But they also don't know that people can't shapeshift. They don't know that for sure. They don't know for sure I'm talking like even when they're like 8, 9 years old, even now they can kind of go, I understand how a car works.
I understand that you put fuel in a car and it drives. Even if they understand how a combustion engine works like that, they understand certain rules. But you can talk to a 9 year old and they can be 100 convinced that magic is real with no doubt in their mind. They may not believe in Santa Claus anymore.
But as you start to talk to them, you'll find a lot like 8, 9 year olds don't believe in leprechauns. Leprechauns aren't real. I know that's made up. But still believe in Santa Claus or fairies or the ability to shape shift or monsters for a child.
The maybe is vast. The maybe is vast. Maybe there really is a monster under my bed. Maybe Mickey Mouse.
If you call Disneyland at three in the morning, Mickey Mouse will come out of your television. Bloody Mary. All of these things. They might exist and sometimes believe they do exist.
We're going even further back than that. We're talking about an unborn child. How would a child in the womb experience a haunting? Isn't that great?
Because I read this and I thought about it. I go, we can figure stuff out to a certain degree. We can first go, is this real or is it all in my head? I'm gonna walk back and forth.
I'm gonna see if I can replicate the motion of these photos. What's going on to a child? All they are hearing is the mumbling voices of the adults that are constantly around that child in the womb. It's like hearing echoes upon echoes.
There's this constant rhythmic day and night. What is day and night to an unborn child? The mother's heartbeat. It's the only reality you know.
The warmth. You're inside a human body. What is it, like 98 degrees in there? I don't know if there's a little cooler part for the baby, but the heat and the noise, that's completely gibberish.
Not only do they not speak the language the parents are speaking, it's the sound waves are so muffled by the time they actually reach the ears of this child in the womb. This constant rhythm. Now add into that mix a spirit. Would the child sense it?
Would they even know? See, here's the thing. This is why I don't spend a long time talking about this. But I find this fascinating.
Adults can barely perceive ghosts. There are some people who are very specialized that we call them mediums, paranormal researchers, ghost hunters will go out to locations and they'll even say, we didn't sense anything. A place that has been recorded to be haunted for 100 years with dozens of reports. People who.
It's their living to go and research these things. They'll go out there and go, we didn't sense anything. It's Hard enough for an adult to sense it, but children seem to sense them easier. What about a baby?
Would a baby in some intrinsic way know that there's a ghost walking by it? Because here's the thing really, at the end of the day, whether you're this little seven month old baby boy in the womb or grandpa's ghost, they're both on the same cycle of life. I'm not asking if a seven month old baby in the womb can you tell what the wind temperature is outside? There's that thread that connects them all.
That child in the womb will not saying this to be sad, but that child in the womb will someday die themselves, hopefully after a long and rich life. And then their spirit will be there. And if you look at things like reincarnation or just even where the souls of humans come from, that seven month old baby in the womb is closer to it's seven months away. I mean, again, there's a hypothetical.
We know even less about this than we do about ghosts, than we don't know about ghosts. But if you look at the bank of Souls, we actually did an episode on that long time ago. People love that episode. I heard this show notes.
I haven't listened to it in six years, but I love the story. The bank of Souls. You have this place where the souls of children wait to be born. This dude is seven months removed from that.
I'm 47 years removed from that. And the spirit that haunts this house, it's almost like they have a foot in that reality and a foot in ours. A foot in the reality of not just the afterlife, but the before life. And how is all of this connected?
And so it's really interesting to think like, can any child in the womb sense of spirit and would they have a greater understanding? Instinctively, I know that their brains are doing algebra in the womb. But sometimes we just pick up stuff from instinct, like the mother. A lot of the story is instinct, right?
She goes, we didn't feel uncomfortable. I don't know what it was, but it was something I felt weird. I felt off. Would the child also sense these things?
Would the child have a deeper connection to the spirit world? I always say, we'll wrap up like this. I got one more story for you guys. But I always say, you know, death is very scary because it's the unknown.
And sometimes there's two factors to it. One is the actual process of dying, which can either be calm or violent. You can be surrounded by loved ones or you can die alone. There are all these different factors to it that make people afraid.
They don't want to die alone. They don't want a violent death. And so we have that. But then there's also the fear or the unknowing of what comes after, or the unknowing of what comes after.
Some people are very, very good adherence to their faith. And they say, well, I know it comes after, Jason, because my faith has told me this. My religion has given me a blueprint of what the next world will look like, so they're more at peace. But I've also met atheists who say, there's nothing.
There's nothing after this. And you know what? I'm not scared either. It's not like they fear the eternal void.
I have one person, Lana, a good friend of mine. She said this. I'm gonna probably butcher what she said. She goes, in a way, there's kind of a beautiful sense of finality to think that when I die, I no longer exist.
There's something peaceful about that as well, which to me, the idea of utter obliteration terrifies me to more than going into some sort of paradox, if you can believe that just dissolving into nothing is more scary to me than what comes after. But I also have a lot of questions about what comes after. Not in the sense that I think that I'm gonna go to hell, or I'm worried about not getting into heaven or anything like that. I have questions like, how does Bradley work in heaven?
When I die, will I instantly know how all of my favorite movies end? Even the ones that were made decades after? Because I love movies, right? I love movies.
When I die, I hope I get to watch movies. And people said, well, then you'll know when you die. Apparently, I've heard people say this before you die. You're just kind of filled with all the knowledge in the question.
I don't want that just to pop in my head. I mean, I could go to Wikipedia and read the synopsis of the movie. I love the art of the movie of the television show. I love the art of how it's all put together.
I don't want to die and then go, oh, so that's what the Next 10 Star Wars Movies are like, man. Really? Dime's a bullet. Glad I died when I did.
You know, I want, I, I, I want to be watching movies when I'm dead, describing more Beetlejuice of the world than any biblical paradise. But I think you guys know what I mean every so often. It's so funny, because in this field, I'M constantly looking up researchers and things like that. And I think we're kind of like, you know, meeting ghost researchers, meeting Bigfoot people.
I actually Bigfoot himself every time I come across an article, and it'll be like, famed Bigfoot researcher died at 77. You know, he'd been searching for Bigfoot, been collecting stuff for the last four years. One of the biggest Bigfoot researchers in America used to live in the dowels. And I wish that I'd gone out there.
He had a museum. I don't remember his name, but he had a museum. And I wish I'd gone out there to, you know, go to the big museum. Actually might still be around.
But I. I think I go, imagine when he died, you know what his first question is going to be? You know, he's not gonna be like, oh, man, I wonder if they made more Transformer movies. He's gonna be like, so Biffo was real, right?
That whole thing that I've been searching for my entire life, I wasn't getting tricked, right? And you think, well, now he has the answer to that, whatever that answer is. Where was I going with this? What was it?
Oh, yeah, movies. Movies. What was it? Why was I even talking about that?
Mostly something about, what was it you guys like? I was talking about ghost babies. And then. So anyways, the point is that that old man, I think, is what I was saying, that old man ghost, if he's in the cycle, it's closer to the irrational.
I don't remember what I was talking about, but. Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me say this real quick. We'll move on to the next one.
We only know our reality. And we're afraid. Some of us are afraid. How about dying?
Most people don't want to die particular ways, but in how you die, in what comes after. All we know is this reality. All I know is gravity. All I know is linear time.
So the idea of going to a place where those two things don't exist, as far as we know, like, that totally boggles my mind. And we become very fearful of death, of missing people, of missing out on experiences, trying to avoid death, and all these things. And then when it comes, when we're laying there, whether we're holding our guts in because of a boar attack in the middle of the woods, or we're sitting in a hospital bed surrounded by our family members, we die. I've always equated that to birth in the sense that for those first nine months, that is the only reality, you know, that is the only thing you can perceive.
That is the only thing you can perceive is the heat and the thumping and the echoed voices speaking something. You have no concept of what language is. You don't have really concept of what light is. You're just this little person existing.
And this is the only thing you know. It's the only thing you've ever known. And then one day, and you don't even know what day is, you have no concept of anything all of a sudden, and you don't know what sign is. Eventually you are born into a world that is noisy and bright and uncomfortable.
Everything that touches you is alien and weird. Nothing makes sense. Where's the warmth? Where's.
Where's the rhythm? Where am I? And then as time goes on, you start to acclimate to this world, to this life, to this reality. When we die, it will be like being born.
And we fear it, just like the fetus. The fetus doesn't even know at some point it's going to come out. It just is. We can start to go, oh, eventually I'm going to die.
And see people die around us. The child in the womb, this little baby, this fetus is alone. And it's terrifying, absolutely terrifying to come into the brightest, loudest place ever. That's what we call our world.
I try not to fear, in a way, I don't fear death. I don't fear death itself. I'm not worried about dying alone. I'm worried about what happens after death.
I don't fear it, but I find it confusing. Maybe that's why that baby analogy works so well with me. Maybe that's why it works so well with me. Because to the child, this is terrifying, this is horrifying.
This is someplace they don't want to be. But I think about what a great life I've had and billions of babies around the world have had, but we don't want to be here in the first place. We actually just wanted to keep chilling where we were at. But you don't.
You don't get to. Eventually you gotta come out. And I kinda use it as the same thing about dying. Marcus.
Marcus. A little sobbing in the corner. He's like, jason, that's horrifying, man. It's horrible.
He's all, I never thought Lauren was scary, but now you're making me feel bad. He's all going to one of those maternity wards and he's like, I'm sorry. Sorry, babies. I'm sorry for all you.
Security's taking him out. Well, security's dragging him out. I'm gonna go and toss some of the keys to the world famous carpetcopter. We got more stories.
This is gonna be a long episode. I apologize for that. We're not gonna have anyone for three weeks, so let's just do it right, Marcus, sabotage the keys to the carpet copter. Why don't we leave behind this maternity war?
Now there's a restraining order against you. Fly us all the way out to a house in the suburbs. We're headed all the way up to this house. And it's funny, I talked about the story a little bit in the last story, so I might skip a little bit of the preamble.
But first off, I gotta give a shout out to the last 747. They're the one who sent the story over to me. Always appreciate all the hard work you're doing getting stories for this show. We're about to meet a young mother.
Let's go ahead and call her Melissa. That's not her real name. She said this story took place years ago. And I was able through a couple context clues thinking it takes place in the 2010s so it's not super far in the past.
But it's not yesterday either. Somewhere in between there, the far flung past thing yesterday. We're about to meet this young mother, Melissa. She's in the kitchen, she's cooking dinner and she hears her daughter, Bella, I believe that's real name actually.
Bella, five years old, is playing in the other room with her balloon. And she's like, jason, that's what you think it sound like? That's terrifying. Have you ever been around a child?
Bella's having a good time. She's laughing and giggling, tasting. We get it. Please stop make all these noises.
She's like, why does my daughter sound like a 47 year old man? Bella's laughing and giggling. She's so happy. And Melissa looks over and she sees old Bella just kind of having fun playing with this balloon.
But then Bella begins to squeal. I don't know what squeal sounds like something. She has asthma. She's squealing, which makes Melissa pause.
She said, usually the only time Bella squeals is when she's being chased or tickled. She's never seen Bella this happy, just hanging out by herself. Jason, we know he gave it away. He gave it away.
We know it's an imaginary friend who turns out to be a dead relative. You've mentioned it several times in the preceding 40 minutes. That's what I'm saying they kind of skipped the preamble a bit. Melissa does realize what makes she's really, really happy.
She's never this happy by herself. She squeals like this and loves playing with other people. But she's only playing in there by herself. When the mother looks over and it's just kind of watching her at this point because Bella keeps on making these noises she only makes when someone else is playing with her, she looks over and she sees Bella is on the ground, rolled up in a ball, out of breath from laughing so hard.
She's laughing and her face is turning red like she can't even catch her breath. Melissa's watching her daughter do this. She's never seen her act like this. And that's when Bella yells, stop it, Papa.
It tickles. Melissa completely freezes when she says this. There's no one else there in the home even except for Melissa and Bella. Melissa asks, who you.
Who are you talking to? And Bella catches her breath and the laughter dies down a bit. And she points towards an empty corner of the room. She goes, she's just pointing there.
Melissa says, I don't see anyone, Bella, but it really sounds like someone was playing with you. Someone was tickling you, making you laugh. It's Papa. He's tickling me.
Playing keepy uppy with the balloon. Melissa walks over and puts Bella in her lap and says, you say he's pawpaw. What does he look like? Bella's sitting there on her mother's lap and she said, he has a big cut.
Probably more sense if you said it in normal voice, maybe, but he has a big cut on his head. A big cut on his head. And he said his head hurts from being under the dirt. So translated to adult adulties, Bella says that this man she's playing with who's tickling her and having a good time with her and playing keep away with this balloon, has a big cut on his head and his head hurts from being under the dirt.
Melissa's doing her best to try to keep her composure in this moment, but she knows exactly who Bella is talking about. I think even Pawpaw kind of gave her a clue. But the massive ED injury and being buried definitely reminds Melissa of her own father years ago. Years ago, Melissa's father was driving his truck and he got in a rollover accident which ended up launching him out of the car.
And as a result of this, he smashed his head against the concrete. I don't know if he was flung out of the car or if as the car was rolling. Both of them sound horrible. But as the car's rolling, his head was leaning out of like say the drive side window and smashed.
I mean, which one would you rather do? I mean, neither preferably, but imagine being in a rollover and thinking you're going to be okay, which, I don't know, being a rollover, maybe you never think you're going to be okay, but your windows roll down and your head leans out and it smashes against concrete. All of that steel encasing, all of those safety measures there for nothing if you're heading in that window. But he also got an injected from the vehicle.
Anyways, he ended up getting this huge gash on his head. He spent a week in a medically induced coma as the doctors were trying to save him. But after a week, they declared him brain dead and he was buried in the family cemetery after that. Didn't know any of that details.
I don't know if he died before Bella was born. I believe so. Even if he died after she was born, she's still only five years old. They're not gonna be like, and then grandpa got his brain smashed out.
What happens is, after this particular play date from beyond the grave, Bella starts to see papa more and more often and is talking about him even more, which, I mean, on the one hand it would make you go, wow, there's life after death. And my father, Bella's grandfather, is still here with us to be part of her life. That's nice. The other thing, he has a permanent head injury and his head hurts from being in the dirt.
So yeah, I want to believe in life after death. I do believe in life after death, but I'd rather not be a ghost that think about it, his head hurts so much that he told his five year old granddaughter about it. Let's say I was walking around and had a huge gash in my head and I see a five year old and they're like, dude, what happened to you? And I was like, don't ask, don't ask.
It was very violent. I'd rather not talk about it. But I have this massive gash in my head and they go, does it hurt? Tears are streaming down my face.
It's fresh. There's blood streaming out of me right now. You'd be like, nah, it's cool, man, I'm not too worried about it. You know you failed your skateboard once.
It's scraped your knees just sound like that. That's my brain. I was like, oh, sorry. Some of my memories just Fell out stuff back in there.
I was like, ooh, yummy. Making mouse pancakes for my great grandma. Don't lose that memory. The fact that she knows he's in pain.
Like, how much pain do you have to be in before you tell a kid? Is basically what I'm saying. I think most of us would just be like, oh, no, I'm totally fine. You're just a torso.
You're just a torso in a head. Sit in the living room, don't worry about it, kid, I'm fine. But this five year old girl, I imagine he's like playing with a balloon and she's like, oh, Papa, you're so funny. And he's like, yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.
I'm in dead space. I came across the veil. I transcended through reality and came to the world of the living. I want to play with you, but I also want to tell you how much this sucks.
One day, Melissa's folding laundry and she hears Bella talking to somebody. Well, you figure it's going to be Papa, right? It's not a phone call or anything like that. She looks over, she goes, hey, Bella, Bella, come here, come here, I want to talk to you.
Bella comes walking over. Little girl legs, tiny little five year old legs. Melissa says, who are you talking to? And again, come on, dad, just cross over.
I love you and all. You don't need to haunt the police if you're in constant agony. Melissa's doing the laundry and asks Bella, hey, who are you talking to? Bella walks up and says, it's Pawpaw, but he's crying.
You're like, oh, damn it. Come on, man. Just trying to do laundry. It's really cool.
You're part of our life. But if you're gonna complain about your massive head wound every single day. Oh, big cry baby over there. Bella says, it's Papa.
He's crying. And Melissa is like, why? I got one guess. The massive gash in his brain.
But why is Papa crying? And Bella reaches up and grabs her mom's hand and takes Melissa to Melissa's bedroom. Bella just points at the bed. Melissa goes, well, yeah, yeah.
Is Papa on my bed? Yeah, I get that. But why is he crying? Bella turns and speaks to.
You know, she's the only one who can see this. Melissa can't see any of this. But Bella turns and looks to where she was pointing and says, papa, why are you sad? Then there's a pause, as if listening to an answer and getting a full answer.
Bella turns back to her mother and says he said they're happy tears because he loves you and me beautiful. Sorry I called you crybaby earlier dad. Or your brain coming out of your skull. Oh that's sweet.
Papa is crying because he loves us so much. But it still leaves her and us with an interesting question and she sums it up like this. This was post online by someone going by the name dearmoon and she ended it her post with this quote. Other things have happened since then but this first time experience has always left me wondering.
I'm wondering can my daughter see ghosts? And is my dad stuck? Has he been stuck for 14 years? That's kind of where I thought the story took place in the the mid-2010s, right somewhere around there.
We don't know. We don't know when the story took place. It's kind of the middle. So now it's been 14 years since its accident but we don't know how long ago the story itself to place for how old Bell is at this point.
It's an interesting question really. There's two. The first one is like we've discussed before, children are very good about seeing spirits and I just repeat, I just went off on its end to the last one start talking about ghost watching movies. But it's this idea that children don't know that things are true.
The reason why I bring that up on a long rant about it, I always like to mention this episode. I put the full episode in the show notes. But we do see this happen time and time again and it may have happened to us and we don't remember. I have a story in the show notes.
I have a story about a young girl who stops and talks to an old man who sits on the corner step or this porch of his house. When she would walk from her mother's house to her grandma's house along the way, there was always this kind old man that sat on the porch of this house. This little girl would talk to him all the time. Eventually somebody asked because they knew there was nobody sitting there.
They figured it was imaginary friend. At some point her mother or grandmother asked who are you talking to? She's like a nice old man. The little girl says, what does he look like?
She described him. Later that day, the little girl's grandmother showed the girl a photo of grandpa who had died before she was born. And that was the man she was talking to on the stairs. She never saw him again after that because when she was confronted with the reality of that man is dead.
And as a society we Believe ghosts don't exist. It's like her reality caught up, caught up to her. Because now that's a man who's not alive. I have a close friend of mine, and she told me the story.
I didn't have this particular experience, but she told me a story that she had when she was like 5 or 6, she had his best friend. They hung out all the time, and one day they were walking down the street. Back in the 80s, you were allowed to just walk around as a kid, and someone stopped them. An older kid stopped them and said, why are you guys hanging out?
Why are you guys always friends? And they're like, okay, can we get along? And, like, we share the same interests. And the older person said, yeah, but one of you is white and one of you is black.
And my friend, she said, I turned and I looked, and for the first time in my life, I noticed that she was black. Interesting, interesting story. It was just. She never noticed.
It was just nothing. She goes, I remember when somebody said that to me. I turned to my look. For the very first time in my life, I noticed my friend was black.
So you have the same thing happen with the paranormal. I think it's actually more likely to happen with the paranormal than with race. But you see what I mean? Like, hey, someone else can say, here is a fact, and it can change everything.
So I think kids just are more open to ghosts exists. So therefore they're able to see them. They don't immediately go, that's not realistic. Disappears.
So can I get her she ghosts? That's a valid question, and I would argue, yeah, and I think most kids can until they're told that ghosts aren't real. The second question is a lot more tricky to answer, and it's honestly more terrifying. One, is my dad stuck?
There's a couple different ways you could look at that, because there's this idea that when you die, you want to try to convince these spirits to go into the light, right? To go into paradise. You don't need to be here on earth anymore. A lot of ghost lore talks about spirits being stuck here because they don't know that they're dead or they don't want to be dead.
They're stuck in this confused state. But I don't really know if that's what she means by is my dad stuck? Because he seems to be kind of a very interactive spirit. He's playing with his daughter.
He loves watching this family continue to grow Even though he's not there physically. He's crying happy tears he's running the gamut of emotions from fun to tears of joy. But also he's experiencing massive cranial pain. And just the idea of his ghost showing up with such a grisly wound is intriguing because while we do have ghosts that come back, you know, Civil War ghosts that are missing limbs, headless horsemen.
Right. Very famous ghost who died grizzly. You have a lot of times ghosts of people hanging, they'll be hanging forever. You'll see the ghost of the man swaying from the noose on a lonely night.
But a lot of the times when we see family ghosts coming back, they don't have such horrible injuries. Most of the time. There are exceptions to that. Sure.
But when your grandma passes away and then you wake up in the middle of the night one night and you smell the smell of her perfume, and you see grandma kind of watching you at the end of the hallway and walk into the bedroom, you can still terrify. I always say that like, oh, that'd be fine, that would be fine. But she's not blue. She's not in a state of rigor mortis.
The smell of her favorite perfume isn't rotted and corrupted by the smells of death. No. Generally, it's an uplifting message. A lot of times people have these dreams of their loved ones coming back after they've died.
Like a couple nights later, you dream of them and it's like, oh, you feel like they're saying goodbye. It's not a nightmare. You're not being chased by a ton of zombies. And King zombie is your recently dead loved one.
Most of the time they come back and they're either whole or they're better than they were when they died. They're more youthful, they're full of vigor, even though the last three years of their life they were on a hospital bed. So it's very interesting that this ghost has such a horrible injury and he's in pain, and especially pain from being in the dirt. There's a lot of different things you can look into with this story, right?
Ghost feeling pain. It's not impossible, but it's very rare when a ghost will stay there in pain. And again, the reason why, because she stated that she could go, papa, why is your head leaking? He goes, that's nothing, kid.
Doesn't hurt at all. He must have said that it hurt because that's how he described them. Carrying over the look of the physical wound. We do see that carrying over the pain of the physical wound is not impossible.
We do see that, but it's very Rare. The idea of him saying he's hurt, again, the way that's phrased isn't even that he's hurt from getting his head smashed against the ground, from being under the dirt. It's almost the idea of he's in pain because he's dead, which is the most terrifying part of it. Now, again, we're really digging into this quote we got from a five year old girl.
To be fair, we're really digging into it. She might have misinterpreted some things, but that goes against what we think death will be and especially a burial death because a lot of religions that is required. Now it's possible, again, maybe he didn't want to be buried. Maybe what he's expressing is a little bit different than how she's saying it.
Or she could be repeating them verbatim. He could be like, oh, it sucks. There's maggots. There's maggots everywhere, dear.